well--morality suffices. But the athletic attitude tends ever to
break down, and it inevitably does break down even in the most
stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when morbid fears
invade the mind. To suggest personal will and effort to one all
sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to
suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be
consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of
the universe <47> recognizes and secures him, all decaying and
failing as he is. Well, we are all such helpless failures in the
last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with
lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest
of us down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the
vanity and provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us
that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it
can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest
substitute for that well-BEING that our lives ought to be
grounded in, but, alas! are not.

And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her
hands. There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to
no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own
has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as
nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of
mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our
safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our
spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over,
and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an
eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about,
has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere
morality, it is positively expunged and washed away.